Be thankful. Beloved. A song of incarnation.

Be thankful. Beloved. A song of incarnation.

Why should I feel loved? Why be thankful to be alive?

Religious people always go on about the love of God – but what if you have never experienced this, or don’t believe in God? I believe we can find joy and peace and love within our experience, just because we are human.

To be able to be.

This is the beginning of thankfulness.

I have the space within myself to be quiet.

In my inmost reflections I discover a capability to think deeply, to weigh up and to value.

When I do not allow the turmoil of distractions to rush at me from the external world and occupy my mind and unsettle my heart, I discover tranquillity, a pool of stillness, that is simply there. It is the greatest discovery of life – a reservoir of calm refreshment, unfathomably deep. Even the terrible anxiety of my frail and fearful humanity cannot taint the purity of the profound truth that wells up from this pool – I do not know what to call it. Names come with baggage and baggage that is unhelpful simply needs to be discarded – heaved off by an effort of faith and will. Is it my soul? Or God? I will let you decide. Perhaps something else. I really do not think it matters what we call it; it is there.

Perhaps you have not yet found this pool, in which case such words of mine can infuriate and hurt, though they are intended to point forward with hope. What I am trying to do is suggest that there is cause for great joy and peace – and hope, regardless of what you believe, or have experienced in life, simply because of how things are. That is, because of how you are. If you have not found this pool yet, or not realised how precious it is, that does not mean it is not there. It is always there; it cannot not be there – because this is who we are and how we are.

It is our very ability to look inwardly and reflect that is the guarantee that this reservoir of goodness is there – rather, that it is here at the very heart of you. Perhaps this again rouses anger: “How can you know what I have experienced in life in order for you to declare that there is something so positive and good and hopeful at the very centre of me?”.

It’s because our inner judgement is not simply a balance – think of those old-fashioned scales held by a figure of justice. So, we are not completely dependent on our experience – as though only if we are healthy and wealthy and have enjoyed a good life, or if we have a natural propensity to feel the presence of God, can we expect to find a pool of goodness at our heart – while those whose lives are blighted by war and poverty and hate must inexorably be led to drink from a pool of bitterness that has come to fill their heart.  It is not like this. We do have a balance within us to judge fairly what to do in the world, and that is vitally important. But with our inner judgement on ourselves, our balance has been tipped to the positive in the act of creation. For, within us, we have the ability to choose. We are not prisoners of our circumstances or our experience. Even though it is our ability to choose that is so often the cause of our despair, when we have chosen badly, yet the ability to choose is supremely beneficial. It is what gives us freedom and power. And when we choose to use those gifts to sit quietly with ourselves, we discover that the material of which we are made has a grain within it – like the grain of a piece of wood – and our grain tends towards the good.

Of course, this inner goodness is not invincible or incorruptible – many people are corrupt. But our natural goodness has to be distorted before corruption becomes our settled state. Perhaps if a person experienced nothing but suffering and injustice, we must expect it is likely that their inner nature will be atrociously damaged, but I think corruption does not take charge of a person’s life unless they willingly take it on board. Otherwise, the resilience of our goodness is truly a wonder to behold.

So, we sit quietly with ourselves, and we discover the freedom to choose, and so this raises the question, “What do I want?”. Immediately, our sense of direction bursts into life, and we realise we have a goal, and so a mission. There is something important for each one of us to do. And we have the freedom and power to decide what that is. Yes, it is true that so many of us find ourselves in terribly constrained situations where the desire of our heart is to all practical concerns hopelessly out of reach. Yet we still have a desire in our heart. Even if we are always frustrated in our aims, we are never impoverished, for we have this most precious desire within us. And this fuels our hope and our energy and our actions. We are never powerless because we always have this inner freedom. And nearly everyone of us finds some ways to express our desires. We use our freedom and power to create something good.

As we consider ourselves, we cannot escape the reality of others. To have desires and goals, to seek to act, inevitably brings us into contact with the other. So, the other dimension of our thankfulness is that we are not alone. Counter-intuitively, though our core inner experience is of the profound stillness of being alone at our deep pool, where only we can visit, and which gives us our essential view of ourselves, it is not aloneness that governs our lives. The supreme task of our existence is to meet the other, and to love them. All our desires, our goals, our striving, cause us to reach out beyond ourselves to encounter others and to learn to treat them as people like ourselves. To realise that each one has their own pool, ineffably precious to them. A pool where all their hurts and wounds are washed clean, just like we wash our own. A pool where treasures glitter to delight the heart and mind, which they pull up to show to us, as we seek to find something precious within ourselves to share with them.

I would like to say that the ultimate satisfaction is to invite an other to meet us at our own pool – but I don’t think that is possible. There is something about the way we are made which means that only we have access to that private place where we speak to ourselves beyond the veil. Yet this does not diminish, but enhances, the wonder that when hands touch in the world, so also hearts touch, and a draught of the other’s pool is poured into our own, and ours into theirs. This is the glory of being alive, to be able to share with others our unique self, and to treasure more than our own life what others have shared with us.

There is one exception. No-one can stand beside us at the pool where we are most truly ourselves, except for the one who was there at the very beginning of existence, and who is responsible for our existence, and, most of all, who is responsible for the grain within us that points to goodness. Perhaps you feel that I am suddenly cheating: I said that I would try and explain why we should feel loved and be thankful just from the facts of our existence, without bringing in any other thoughts. And now I have sneaked in God as though that were my aim all along. But remember, we are not bothering about names and ideas, only what we experience. I do not care whether it is God or something else, I am only trying to describe what we can discover within our own experience. The self is there – here within us.  We have been using the image of a pool to try and help us to think about it. I claim – and I think your own experience declares that it is true – that this pool has a character, a nature – one that is supremely personal to the individual that each one of us is, but with a nature that is ingrained with goodness – it is simply how we are. Or if you are still sceptical or even too pessimistic, it is simply that we choose – or at least that we have the capability to choose – goodness. This is the basis of our freedom, our power, our hope, our satisfaction and our achievement.

So, the greatest – nearly – gift in life is to discover our own pool, and to learn to visit it, and to delight in what we find in it. But when we sit quietly, all alone, discovering what we might find within, there is something even more, for we also discover the presence of the other. Not the other as when we were thinking about meeting other people – people whom we experience within the material world. There is “another other” whom we experience within the intimate privacy of ourselves. I claimed that no-one else could visit us there, and now I contradict myself. But not quite. Perhaps there is still no-one there, and we are still alone within the utterly private confines of our own person. Except that, like an echo in a cavern, we hear our own words coming back at us, but now no longer simply our words, but the words of this other other, who now speaks to us in what could – and perhaps we thought, should – be entirely our own domain. What would otherwise be entirely private has been entered by this other – except that it seems to us that this other was there before we were. Either way, the most profound discovery is that we are not alone – not even when to all observation we are. And this other loves us. The echo of our words is transformed into something entirely pure and good, and truthful and lovely. And we enter into a relationship with the other who is translating our words, whether good or bad, into an impetus to goodness and compassion.

Personally, I think that there is enough in the first part of what we have been thinking about to justify our thankfulness. But when we also consider the reality of what is there to be discovered: that there is a love at the heart of us that has no dependence on what is happening in the outside world, then truly there is cause for joy beyond measure.

So, I call this a song of incarnation. We are alive! And because we are alive we are thankful, and joyful and we know a profound love, here at the very centre of us, where no-one can come except ourselves – except ourselves and this other. So, if we are willing, our life is a communion of love between ourselves and the other.